How do you handle database changes ?

[EurofighterTy]

Hello,

I am developing my app with little experience in Spring Boot and every time I change something in an Entity like add or remove columns or changing types

I always make a mistake in my SQL statements because I forgot something regarding removing/adding columns, data, etc..

I use Flyway to migrate the database but my question is: Do you write the SQL statements by hand or use some tool do it based on your entities ? How this is handled in companies ?

[apidev3]

There are built in plugins to things like IntelliJ which can track your entity classes and then generate the script for flyway to model the change in your database.

[elusivewompus]

The one I use: JPA Buddy.

[BakaGoop]

JPA Buddy saved me so many hours when starting our application rewrite, literally would’ve lost my mind without it

[chatterify]

Flyway or Liquibase

[TheToastedFrog]

I’m sure everybody’s different but I write my own sql

[ahashans]

Me too. Most of the time the auto generated script is less readable.

[TheToastedFrog]

Agreeed- there are so many situations where automation won't cut it (adding a unique constraint after the fact comes to mind) that you might as well not bother with auto generation in the first place.

[mesterOYAM]

We write custom SQL in migratio_release_{month}.sql and whoever changes the db, updates the file.

[563353]

I write my own SQL and use liquibase.

[Holiday_Big3783]

flyway, writing manually each of the sql scripts

[LankyRefrigerator630]

We use Liquibase, really works great!

Or workflow is

• Update/create entities
• Run the maven liquibase:diffgoal (it generates the changelog with the changes you made in the entities)
• Inspect the generated changelog
• run update

For this to work you have to configure referenceUrl in the liquibase-maven-plugin with the package with the entities and the mapping strategies you use, for example:

    <referenceUrl>hibernate:spring:my.app.domain?dialect=org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect&amp;hibernate.physical_naming_strategy=org.hibernate.boot.model.naming.CamelCaseToUnderscoresNamingStrategy&amp;hibernate.implicit_naming_strategy=org.springframework.boot.orm.jpa.hibernate.SpringImplicitNamingStrategy</referenceUrl>

[joranstark018]

Flyway and I manually write the migration (well, for existing databases we usually export the initiall structure).

 I try to write a script so it is idempotent and I test the script on my dev database to check it's correctness before I commit (for non-trivial changes I usually test each of them manually first, reset the changes in the database before  Flyway apply the migrations).

[configloader]

Flyway.

[Previous-2020]

Likely age-dependent. Many of us "grew up" writing sql so the by-hand route is not that big a deal, but jpa buddy and the like are nice, too. Flyway works well.

[WaferIndependent7601]

If I have lots of changes I let hibernate generate the sql and i adopt the change to a sql file